squishy, domesticated

My smart, talented, beautiful mother, Jody, died October 9th in the arms of my dad, Ron, her college sweetheart and loving partner of forty years. Her beloved dog, Poppy, was there for her. I believe in my heart that her many devoted animal companions from throughout her life were there for her as well. Although her decline happened so precipitously that my brother and I were not able to be there, we both got the chance to speak to her and tell her how loved she was and remains. She had a laugh you could instantly pick out of a fully packed audience. She was a mother to many more than just her biological children, and a patron, mentor, and steadying comfort to many others. She was beloved by animals, and feared by anyone who tried to behave unjustly toward people she loved. She was a soft-hearted rescuer of any highway litter that resembled a wayward turtle and the occasional actual wayward turtle. She added creativity and spark to everything she touched, all the way through to the end. Sometimes I couldn't tell if she was saying something that didn't make sense to me because she was confused or because I simply wasn't poetic enough to understand it--probably both. She was attuned to the universe, the ethereal, and the divine in a way that a concrete pragmatist like me could never comprehend. She would say, "It will be okay," and I would demand to know how. She spent my whole life trying to build softness, optimism, and compassion in her hard, stubborn daughter. I will spend the rest of my life trying to live by her example of graciousness, empathy, and bravery. She didn't always understand me, nor I her, but we loved each other fiercely. I will miss her every single day forever. But I absolutely feel her presence telling me that it will be okay, that she is okay, that I will be okay. She lived with cancer on and off for nearly a decade, enduring torturous treatments and countless indignities so that she could be with us for as long as she could. We are devastated, but overwhelmed with gratitude for the time we had, and relieved that she is no longer in pain.

Toward the end of her life, as I think a lot of us do in moments of anxiety and doubt, my mom wondered aloud if her life had been small. This might amuse those who knew her even casually because of course the last adjective anyone would use to describe my mom is "small." Nothing about her could be accurately described as small. But we tend to see ourselves with our binoculars on backwards, especially when we feel limited or lacking. My mom could not, in these moments, see herself as more than a pile of facts, of letters from the Social Security Administration totaling her alleged lifetime productivity, a cumulative list of the abilities and activities she had lost to cancer whether by the cancer itself or the ravages of the treatments she went through. But we know different, we know she did not and could not have lived a small life.

She was a main character in an epic love story. She met the love of her life, Ron, one fateful weekend during their first semester at college and the rest, as they say, was history. My parents had the kind of relationship people spend their entire lives trying to find or cultivate, and few succeed. The kind of comfortable, organic, mutually supportive friendship and partnership that regardless of whether you believe in fate or soulmates or simply human chemistry seems touched by some magic above and beyond our understanding. For forty years they made each other laugh, comforted each other when they cried, and mildly embarrassed their children with public displays of affection. Their marriage survived and flourished through two children, countless different career paths, cross-country moves, and ultimately the pain and indignity of living with cancer and dying from it. They built all the small, everyday sometimes thrilling but often mundane trappings of normalcy into an extraordinary, beautiful life together.

She had an innate talent for creating beauty, and lent her wide abilities to everything from arranging flowers for church services, holidays, and both her children's weddings, to building from scraps any Halloween costume we requested, teaching makeup design for school and community theater productions, acting, directing, designing and building sets, painting, jewelry making, singing, playing the flute, and personally cutting many of our family members' hair until her hands, in constant pain from chemotherapy induced neuropathy, no longer allowed it. She could have picked any one of these things to profit from in her life, but largely preferred to offer her gifts for free to her friends, family, and neighbors.

She was unfailingly kind to any creature who needed it. I told her a long time ago that I would tell this story at her funeral, but it's such a family favorite, so illustrative of both her character and our relationship, that most people have probably already heard it. During her first round of cancer treatment, I spent a lot of time in New York acting as her primary caregiver so my dad could spend the necessary hours dedicated to his teaching job. One Spring day it was warm enough and she was at the right point in her treatment cycle to have the energy to go to the park for a short walk. On the drive home, ever alert in the section of the highway to our house in Ithaca that routinely became a busy turtle crossing zone once the daily temperature was high enough to wake them from their winter mud naps, she saw something in the road and asked me to pull over. Too tired to do it herself, but unable to live with the idea of doing nothing, she asked me to walk back down the road to move the small turtle to the other side so it wouldn't be hit by an inattentive or malicious driver. I jogged down the road and then returned back to our car. "Is the turtle okay??" she wanted to know. I told her that I regretted to inform her that her turtle was, in fact, an abandoned bag of poop from the nearby dog park and I had made the executive decision to not rescue it. 

While she behaved with the sort of kindness and consummate compassion that most people associate with fairy tale princesses, no one ever regarded her as anything but a queen because at nearly six feet tall with elegant patrician features, she had the kind of presence required to be repeatedly type-cast as Aggravaine in Once Upon a Mattress. She was at heart a pacifist who disliked conflict, but at an instant was ready to wield her intimidating poise as an advocate for her children against useless school administrators on more than one occasion. And it wasn't just her own children she felt were under her influence and protection. She was a warrior in the fight against hatred and injustice. She valued every individual human and their right to love, to exist, and to thrive. She never stopped caring about justice and equality, and even at the end of her life felt deeply regretful that she couldn't do more than her body would support. Her legacy as a role model for young people standing against all forms of oppression and bigotry will continue long past her body's ability to march for human rights.

As a child at the beach, she was knocked down by an unexpected wave, which filled her lungs and held her down unable to breathe. During this incident, she had a near death experience that would inform her relationship with life, death, and reality from that day forward. She described this as watching her life flash before her, reflecting with some irritation that it seemed rather unfairly short, and then being told sharply by a voice that it wasn't her time yet and being hauled up by the back of her swimsuit by an unseen hand to choke her way to shore. Throughout her life she maintained an intimate and attuned relationship to the universe, nature, and the divine machinations unseen or unexamined by most people. She believed in spirits and the afterlife, that we are more than meat sacks running on intricate electrical impulses. Later in life, she helped moderate online message boards dedicated to near death experiences, and spent hours reassuring other seekers of the unknown and imperceptible that there are many things about the universe we don't understand, but that doesn't make them any less real. Whether a mark of her extreme empathy toward all living things, the early in life opening of some kind of third eye, or simply a lack of skepticism that anything we experience exists solely at face value, she absolutely sensed things more than most people. Animals were drawn to her and trusted her implicitly. She knew people's feelings before they knew themselves. Having spent the latter part of her life with a foot often firmly in both worlds, she enmeshed herself wholeheartedly in both life and death, and taught people around her not to fear either one.